Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Woman Who Invented Adoption (By Stealing Thousands of Babies)

Episode Date: May 2, 2019

In Part Two, Robert is joined again by Sofiya Alexandra to continue discussing George Tann, baby thief.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's starting my podcast? That one wasn't very good. Sophie's not proud of me. You know, they can't all be what's cracking my peppers. They can't even all be what's boiling my pig anuses, which was another hit. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards podcast where we talk about terrible people, but you know that if you're listening, because this is part two of

the Georgia Tann story, and if why would you, why would you just be listening to part two first? Are you some kind of fucking maniac? Did you murder a baby? Sophia Alexandra, how are you doing? You're our guest for today. I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. Host of the Private Parts Unknown podcast. That's great. Kickboxing third place finalist. Actually, first place, kind of upset that you would not mention that. It's actually nude kickboxing. Nude kickboxing. So it's actually a lot harder than regular kickboxing. Yeah, that seems a lot more painful. I'm pretty upset that I wrote down all my credits

for you and you just kind of messed them up, but whatever. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You did not mention like at least three other things that I've done. I am also America's favorite lasagna. America's favorite lasagna. That is right. That is right. Thank you so much for mentioning that. And America's second favorite macaroni and cheese. Okay, yes. I don't like to talk about second place, but I am also America's second favorite mac and cheese. Considering the amount of mac and cheese in this country, pretty good. I mean, yeah, I'm not trying to be falsely modest. Yeah, I am delicious. You are delicious. Thank you. Well, we're talking about someone who's not delicious.

No, Georgia Tan actually is a baby thief and murderer. Yeah. And that's what we're going to talk about today. It's all the murdering. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So Georgia Tan had a reputation for being rather fearless. This was helpful because her habit of abducting thousands of children from poor people occasionally brought violent threats down upon her head. According to Nellie, occasionally. Some people, I don't know, felt like it wasn't right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. She had iron burglar proof bars in the windows of her home and over the course of her career, three separate people tried to kill her. But all of them apparently chickened out, either out of a reticence to take human life or because Georgia scared them away.

Yeah, she was supposed to be pretty terrifying. She was like a very large imposing presence and very mean and apparently at least one case like screamed a guy away who would come to her house to get revenge. Wow. Yeah, she's an imposing lady. I feel like it's like a challenge I'm being presented, but it's like way too late in history. You're like, yes, Sophia, are you brave enough to kill her? Are you brave enough to kill Georgia Tan? I think I am, but it's too late. Now, Georgia's behavior was not strictly legal. There were actually laws in the US about how to adopt babies and she was in violation of basically all of them. In most cases, adoptive parents had to reside in the state they were adopting from. Surrenders of parental rights had to be confirmed

in a court of law. Georgia Tan broke both of these rules flagrantly and regularly, in some cases on a near daily basis. But also she had that judge in her pocket. First was like Judge Daddy and then the second one was that lady. That was crazy. Yeah. So she like did fuck with the legal system, but she like made it work for her. Sometimes just stole babies. I mean, yes, obviously. By the mid 1930s, social workers in Tennessee who weren't in Georgia's pocket had started to complain about all of the laws that she was breaking and maybe she was stealing. Her connections to Boss Crump were enough to protect her, however. And in 1937. I'm sorry, Boss Crump is that from protecting the castle and the princess.

I was going to say he sounds like a guy from the Dukes of Hazard. Oh, Boss Crump is in a real mess of trouble again. Pissed at them Duke boys. Yeah, just really a great fake name. Yeah, it was a great fake name. But in this case, it was a real guy who helped Georgia Tan steal thousands of babies. In 1937, she succeeded in pushing through a new law which legalized adoption for out of state residents. This precedent would have a huge impact on the way adoptions are carried out nationwide moving forward, including today. The new law, however, did require adopt parents to visit Tennessee before finalizing the adoption. But Georgia just ignored this part of it and it was fine. Now, Georgia had started out as an employee of the

Tennessee Children's Home Society, which was based out of Nashville. The director of the agency, Fanny Elrod, was a rather soft person and Georgia basically bullied her into getting whatever she wanted. Fanny was scared of Georgia and basically refused to do anything about the many complaints made against her employee. Since the Children's Home Society did not have a license from the state, every adoption carried out by Georgia Tan in its name was technically illegal. But again, no one did anything to stop her, so it wound up not mattering that it was illegal. Also, once you're getting like amazing newspaper coverage with your Christmas babies, like good luck taking that lady down. Yeah, what are you gonna do? Everyone's like,

she's a saint. She's the Christmas baby kid. Come on, she's the angel that gave people babies. Yeah, she's the baby. And not the angel of death. Not the angel of death. According to the book, The Baby Thief, quote, Georgia frequently falsified the birth dates of many children she placed for adoption. In every case of which I learned she reduced the children's age. She did this to satisfy clients' wishes for the youngest possible babies and to make the children appear bright, even precocious. While Georgia reduced the ages of babies by only weeks or months, she frequently subtracted years from the ages of older children. So, cool. Not dumb. She's like basically like Hollywood. Yeah. She's like, you're looking a little haggard at 10, so we're gonna go ahead.

I'm gonna pull you down to a 7. Yeah. That seems better. Also, I just, something like, just smart about being like, well, if I say this 7-year-old is 4, then he seems smart. Yeah. Like, then he's a really advanced 4-year-old and not just a normal 7-year-old, and I can sell him to a richer family. They're like, stop saying this girl is 7. She has a full seekup. She's definitely 17. It does make me wonder what Ric Flair's real age is. Oh my god, I keep forgetting Ric Flair's one of the stolen babies. Ric Flair. It's the fucking craziest thing. Poor Ric Flair. It's got to be traumatic. Now, like, though, we know how many babies she's stolen placed. Like, so many Americans probably are not living with their families. 70. But we don't know

that he's 70. He could be 72. It could be 74. She probably aged him down. She probably aged him down. Made Ric Flair seem like a super smart baby. Not that he wasn't as smart as a baby. Yeah. I mean, nothing against Ric Flair. Smart guy. Sorry, sorry, you got stolen, Ric. Also, someone stole the K. If you don't make stickers that say sorry, you got stolen, I don't even know what this podcast is. Ric Flair's face. Sorry, you got stolen. Totally. I feel like that's merch. Wait, you have fans. Fan art right now. Get on this. Get us the sorry you were stolen, Ric Flair. Ric Flair merch. We need it. Georgia did not abduct all of her products, of course. She trawled every orphanage in children's home in the state in search of fresh child flesh

to sell. But once her operation was up and running, her most common source of children were the maternity wards of local Memphis hospitals. Damn. She hired a network of spotters who had hang out waiting for poor young women, particularly single mothers, to go into labor. Dude, it's ambulance chasers, but baby chasers. Just looking around for a lady with a big baby bump who looks like she doesn't have much money. She's like, I'm just big. Fuck you. I'm not even having a baby. Stop following me. She's just following a heavy set woman for a couple of days. Just waiting until she, she's like, please stop. Dr. George Lovejoy, who delivered some of those babies later, recalled quote. I'm sorry, Lovejoy. Lovejoy. You are loving the last names here.

The last names are kind of their own podcast because they're amazing. Behind the ridiculous names. Dude, Reverend Lovejoy is a fake character on the Simpsons. And this is a real person named Lovejoy. I think that is a pretty common name. I'm running into some Lovejoys. Are you serious? Yeah. I mean, it is a silly name, but it's a real one. Where are you from? Texas. Oh yeah, probably more Lovejoys out there. Yeah, there's a lot of Lovejoys in Ukraine or California, which is where I've resided. Not a Ukrainian name. Yeah.

I know. Yeah. Ukraine-a-for-nia. Is there like a Ukrainian neighborhood in town that we could get them to rename? There's the Ukrainian Cultural Center. They should call the neighborhood Ukraine-a-for-nia. They're leaving money on the table. Yeah. Okay. Second piece of fan art. Ukraine in the shape of California. Yeah. And it just says Ukraine-a-for-nia. It is for three people. That's what we love doing here is jokes that... That really appeal to no one. ...half a basketball team we'll identify with. Okay. Dr. George Lovejoy, who delivered many of the babies, later called,

quote, Georgia Tann's workers stood outside the door of the delivery room waiting. The minute the baby was born, they would take the papers in and have the mother sign them and the baby would disappear. Now, many of these mothers were still wasted from anesthesia when Georgia's people forced them to sign or were presented as routine papers. This ostensibly medical paperwork was, of course, in reality, a surrender of parental rights. Babies were taken right from their drugged up mommies and flown to new homes the same day. Part of why Georgia was so successful in this was the fact that she literally changed American culture's attitude towards single moms. See, being a single mom has always been difficult, obviously, but for most of American history,

there was not a huge stigma attached to it. Husbands died after all. It was like, you know, fucking, there was no medicine back then. But starting in Memphis, Georgia labored to convince courts and the public that single white women should not be allowed to raise their own babies. This is part of why, on the few occasions she was taken to court over it, Georgia nearly always won her cases. No judge was going to take a baby from a rich or middle-class two-parent household and give it to a single poor woman. Damn. Yep. According to the baby, my mom would have for sure had me stolen. Yeah, a single mom. Yeah, that happened up until very recently, like the 70s in a lot of cases. Yeah. According to the baby thief, quote, by the late 1930s, single mothers were not only

being prevented from bonding with their babies, but often even from seeing them. Mothers were sometimes blindfolded during labor. Some social workers urged pregnant, way-young women to sign forms allowing doctors to circumcise their child if it turned out to be a boy, so that the workers could keep mothers uninformed of even their baby's gender. By the time adoption became nationally popular in the mid-1940s, their reversal was complete. And for the first time in history, white single mothers were expected to surrender their babies for adoption. That relinquishment was endorsed by leaders of such reputable organizations as the Child Welfare League of America, the American Public Welfare Association, the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, and most

psychiatrists and psychologists led dissenting social scientists Clark Vincent to predict a future in which newborns of all white single mothers would be seized by the state. By the 1950s, 90% of white single... Wait, hold on. Can we go back to the fact that they were blindfolded when giving birth? So they couldn't see them. That must have been so terrifying. Yeah. Holy shit. It's already the worst experience. You're all like drugged up, there's pain, they're gonna steal your baby and then like they blindfold you. Yeah. That is nuts. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty fucked. It's like the only game of hide and seek you're gonna ever play with your baby. Oh, it's so much sadder when you think about it that way. I know. But there's no seek. No. It's just

a game of hide. It's a one-time peek-a-boo situation. Yeah. By the 1950s, 90% of white women in maternity homes, which is where poor single women tended to give birth, surrendered their children for adoption. So... Damn. Yeah. Georgia also trawled the various orphanages of Tennessee in search of new inventory. One worker recalled, quote, I can still hear her steps down the hallway and see her funny hats. She had big feet and more black lace up shoes. She always went upstairs to see the babies. There would be masses of them one day and they'd be gone the next. Damn. So Georgia would take pictures of the best babies, which were usually blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and then send them off to prospective clients. These kids were the lucky ones. You know,

the kids who were in genuinely bad situations were often probably helped by Georgia's work, but not always. While many of Georgia's kids wound up in the hands of wealthy, loving families, she didn't actually do any kind of vetting at all to make sure of that. The only background check was whether or not the new mom and dad had hundreds of dollars. Yeah. Exactly. Georgia's kids didn't even all end up in families. In 1929, one of them wound up at the University of Tennessee as a ward of the Home Economics Department, serving as a- Oh my God. A ward of a school department? Serving as a flesh-and-blood textbook for students, the department changed his name from Richard House to Richard Practice House. What? Also Dick House. What? Practice House?

They were like, just so you don't forget that you're essentially chattel like- Yeah. Let's fucking change her name to Practice Guy. A lot of the stuff that went on then did definitely verge on child slavery. It's pretty dark. For years, Georgia Tan was seen as an authority on child welfare. She was, in essence, America's chief social worker. Eleanor Roosevelt asked her for advice on improving conditions for poor children. She was invited to collaborate- She was like, I know how to do it. I know how to do it. Just murder them all. Let me steal or kill them. She was invited to collaborate on books about adoption and sought out by the likes of the New York Times for her commentary on stories of abuse in children's homes around the country.

This was a dark irony because the reality is that Georgia Tan abused children on a scale and with a viciousness more suited for a concentration camp than an orphanage. Children who were abducted by Georgia would spend weeks, months, or even years in a series of dreadfully crowded boarding homes. These were often just small apartments. A two-bedroom might be filled with as many as 10 children. On at least one instance, six infants were found in a single crib. Babies were fed spoiled milk often because functional refrigerators were not always in the budget. Tins of children would be crammed into spaces condemned by authorities as fire hazards. Georgia refused to pay for medical treatment for kids with syphilis or other contagious diseases. That would have cut into her profit

margin. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark, and not on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called InSync. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man,

Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest,

I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. I didn't know how to how to lead into that ad pivot in a graceful way. Yeah, I don't know if you can gracefully transition from baby murder into products and then back to baby murder, but we're doing it. We're doing it because we're going right back to baby murder. So we were talking about how she

often would refuse to pay for medical treatment for kids with contagious diseases because of course that shit's expensive and you're running a business here. According to the baby thief, quote, she refused to even acknowledge illness in her children and forbade her boarding mothers from summoning medical help. Faced with desperately sick children, however, some boarding mothers panicked and sent them to the hospital. The trip was often made too late. The deaths of most of these babies were presumably recorded and the children buried in the area of Elmwood Cemetery used by her adoption agency. But Georgia disposed of the bodies of children whose deaths she could conceal in less regular ways. A reporter for the Press Cemetery passed

Georgia's home one night in the 1940s and saw someone burying something in the backyard, a child the reporter believed. Former investigator Robert Taylor told me that Georgia had had the local Thompson Brothers funeral home cremate some of the children. Getting rid of the evidence, Taylor said, a grave is proof. Damn. Yeah. Pretty fucked up. Charles Carter, a pediatrician who volunteered at the children's home and treated many of Ms. Tan's inventory, told Barbara Raymond that Georgia would even overrule his express medical guidance at times. Quote, I had prescribed penicillin and learned later that she'd ordered her nurses to stop giving it to the baby but continued to chart it as if they were. Georgia Tan simply

would not listen. She would say, I'll take your words under advisement, but she never did. She did what she felt best regardless of what anyone said. She felt she knew the babies and what the babies needed. Like death. Yeah, plague death. So many of Georgia's children got sick that one hospital in Memphis dedicated an entire ward to taking care of them. A Los Angeles hospital had to do the same thing, for the river of sick and dying babies Georgia brought into the city to sell to Hollywood types. By 1932, Memphis, Tennessee had the highest infant death rate of any major American city, mostly thanks to Georgia Tan. Now, we don't know how many babies died in Georgia Tan's care. We do know that in one particularly brutal winter, the winter of 1945,

as many as 50 babies died in the children's home alone. Babies died when they were left out in the sun unattended. Some died within days of arriving in their adoptive homes because no care had been taken to make sure they were fed or medicated in the days and weeks before transit. In at least one case, Georgia Tan abducted a set of premature twins and removed them from the hospital before they were stable. Both twins died. In total, it's estimated that as many as 500 babies died in Georgia Tan's care. The real death toll may be even higher, perhaps much higher. Yeah, that's kind of what it seems. 500 doesn't seem right. It seems like she might have killed a couple thousand babies. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah. If 500 is kind of the minimum, like. It doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't even

make sense. And if you're saying about someone, they killed at least 500 babies. Kind of, I can't really imagine much worse. The only other people you can say that about are usually concentration camp guards. Yeah. Yeah, when you talk about that many dead babies, that's so many dead babies. Or people that orchestrate specifically genocide. Yeah, yeah. It's Georgia Tan and genocide committers. I know. I mean, she's a death all star. Yeah, definitely an achiever. Geez, overachiever. People have asked a lot, you should cover more women bastards on the show, which we're doing, but it's Georgia Tan. She belongs on the list. Yeah, man, she's right up there. She's right up there. She's one of the worst people I've heard about. So question,

is she single? Yeah, well, no, actually. She had a partner who was, I think, on paper, her secretary, because she was lesbian. But did she help murder the babies? Probably right. Yeah. We don't, I mean, not that I know of, but probably right. Yeah. I don't know how you wouldn't be aware of that if your girlfriend's heavy into murder. It probably seeps into your relationship. And from what little we know about it, it seems like it was a pretty abusive relationship. Georgia was definitely the dominant one. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it would be a shocker if you were like, she was the abused one. I'd be like, oh my God, that's what she's taking out on the babies. Yeah. But clearly something happened to her. Her dad was pretty domineering and a dick,

and wouldn't let her be a lawyer and stuff. Yeah, but that doesn't lead to baby murder. I just mean like, do you think she was abused to have like a weird preoccupation with babies like that? Yeah, I think she was abused. I think she got addicted to like the sense of setting these babies up with somebody. And I think, I think some of it is just like, you know, she came from this period of time where you didn't really give that much of a shit about babies in like the 1890s. Like, you know, I think people like thinking of themselves as a good person, even when they're doing terrible things. So she probably was like, I am saving these babies. And she really believed it. And she thought the ones that died, well, they would have grown up poor and that's worse

than death. Right, exactly. Or what does it matter? Yeah. Or like, they were supposed to die. Yeah. I mean, you can say anything to yourself when you're like trying to justify some fucked up shit. You really can't. I say that shit when I'm like getting, you know, like an extra fucking Taco Bell thing that I don't need. Yeah. It's like, you know, it's really close to baby murder basically. Yeah, you and Taco Bell. You didn't need. Taco Bell sponsored the show and we will stop comparing your products to murdering babies. No, no, no, it's way better. It's Taco Bell better than killing a baby. Ding. That's a slogan right there. It sells some fucking again, merch. I'm just coming up with all these merch ideas. And I feel like you should pay me. So thank you. We'll let you know

if the Taco Bell people reach out. Yeah, I think they're kind of have to. I think they're really going to like this. This is a unbeatable ad campaign. Yeah. Yeah. Better than murdering a baby. So, uh, one of the babies that Georgia Tan murdered was the daughter of Alma Sipple. In the spring of 1946, Miss Sipple moved to Memphis with her infant daughter and two year old son. Her boyfriend, Julius Talos, was in the military and had just left for Panama. They planned to marry Alma later recalled, quote, we were so crazy about each other, it didn't matter if we were married or not. So six weeks after moving to Memphis, Alma was visited by a representative of the Children's Home Society named Georgia Tan. Georgia said she was looking into allegations of child abuse against one of

Alma's neighbors. So at first Alma thought nothing was wrong, at least not with her. The next day, Georgia Tan returned in her large black limo. This time she had questions about the child's father. Questions Alma Sipple could not comfortably answer. Next, according to the New York Post, quote, the woman looked at Irma, who had a runny nose and said, your baby's sick, isn't she? You should get her a checkup. Sipple explained that she had no money for a doctor. So the woman generously offered to take the child to the Memphis General Hospital. Looking back, Sipple wonders at her own naivete. How did I mess up so bad? I guess she knew the dumb ones. Still, she had been worried about her baby's health and she'd assumed that she would go with them to the hospital. So she had

signed a piece of paper. When Tan had told her it would be impossible for her to go along, Sipple remembers, I had a weird feeling, but I thought, well, you've got to trust somebody. The paper was of course a surrender of parental rights. Sipple's baby went along with Georgia Tan, and that was the last Alma ever saw of her. When she showed up at the children's ward of the hospital the next day to inquire as to her child status, the nurse told her, you don't have a baby in there. Those children belong to the Children's Home Society. For days, Alma Sipple called the children's home and Georgia Tan. No one answered until weeks later, Georgia picked up and told her that her daughter had died of pneumonia,

in the same sort of way you might tell someone a carton of eggs had broken. Being a human, Alma said that she wanted to bury her child. Georgia told her that would not be possible, saying the state had put her daughter away. After that, Alma says, I guess I went crazy. She left the other children in her mother's charge and went to Memphis to find her baby's grave. She never located it because of course, Georgia Tan never bothered to give her baby a grave. Cool. Fun story. You got a joke to live on this up? 11 that went up. Nah. Well, I guess it's time for another ad pivot. Oh, I mean, this baby murdering story was always going to be a rough one to

pivot to products with. Buy stuff, but not not babies. No, the only thing you should not buy is babies. Buy is people. Yeah. Grown up or small. You know, let's just, let's put it, I don't want to. Don't buy people. Yeah, I'm not trying to be, you know, all controversial. Yeah, not trying to be anti-capitalist here. Just maybe don't buy people. No, it's probably, it's probably a good rule of thumb. Maybe keep that line. Products! During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the

little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become

the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergey Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Good products, solid services. Let's get back to talking about

horrible things. Now at this point, I'll bet you might think something along the lines of Georgia Tan couldn't possibly get any worse. Well, straw man listener, you're dumb for thinking that. Of course she can get worse. In addition to stealing thousands of babies and killing hundreds of them, this is where the molestation comes in. Yep. I was waiting for that. Yeah, she molested a bunch of babies. Yeah. One of her victims as a 54 year old man from Memphis, you know, decades later. Oh, she molested boy babies? Yeah. Yeah, it seems like it. See, this is interesting. I think both genders. Yeah, sometimes people who molest really young, so it's not much of a difference. Not much of a difference. She just wants them to be probably like helpless. Yeah, I think that's probably a

bigger part of it. So one of her victims, you know, decades later as a 54 year old man, claimed he and his twin brother were molested by Georgia when they were eight. He told the daily pantograph, quote, We remember being in a big bed, stripped naked. Georgia Tan and some other people were there reaching for us and kissing us and touching us where we shouldn't be touched. Sexual assault and physical assault sort of blended together for many of Georgia's victims. One of them, a young girl named Mary, recalled Georgia beating her with a wooden spoon in a bathroom. She squatted over me gouging me. She seemed like a giant. She was sadistic, evil. I thought of her as the devil. Damn. Another adoptee, five years old at the time of the abuse,

recalled to Barbara Raymond that yes, sexual abuse at the hands of Georgia Tan was very true, and it was presented as your favor. She says the abuse occurred in a gorgeous room. I remember the shock of the room, so overwhelming and beautiful. I remember being told to come sit in her lap. I keep trying to block it all out, but it keeps coming. It's caused me a lot of problems. You won't find a whole lot of healthy adults who went through there. Now, over the course of this podcast, I've referred to Georgia's children as products and inventory several times. This was not a joke on my part. Georgia Tan's own lawyer called them products. He wrote to one of her clients in 1944. It is not often we have the good luck that we

have in your case, namely of having the merchandise in hand to stock and deliver to you immediately. This is a baby he was talking about. On an occasion in which he couldn't fulfill an order, he told another client, this is one business in which we can never tell when we can fill an order. Human babies were treated very much as commodities in this industry. As the baby thief records, quote, blue eyes were decided advantage, as was female gender. Baby girls are more feminine, alluring. They are grand little self-advisors, and they know instinctively how to strut their stuff. They stretch out their dimpled arms, gurgle at some secret baby joke, blow air bubbles from moist cupids' bow mouths, and women and strong men grow mad, become besotted with

adoration and want to kidnap them on the spot. The author contended that males with the wrong hair color were at a distinct disadvantage. If a boy is redheaded, his chance of finding a new mama or papa is practically zero. Nobody wants him at all. Brandon, a young child abducted by Georgia Tan, later recalled what it was like being abducted for sale. Quote, We were herded into the car and brought back to Memphis. When we got there, they dropped my two brothers off at another holding place and they took me to the house on Poplar. I remember the parties where they would dress up the children and take them downstairs for a meet and greet. Some of the children would come back, some wouldn't.

Cool. Virginia Simmons, one of the babies sold by Georgia Tan, later recalled that she felt like she was ordered, like, quote, out of a Sears-Robert catalog. When she developed scoliosis, her new mother rejected her, saying, I spent a lot of money on you and you're such a disappointment. If I knew you were going to develop that crooked back, I would never have picked you out. Wow. Cool. All told, Georgia is suspected of arranging at minimum 5,000 adoptions. In her career, she built the bones of the modern adoption system that persists nationally and worldwide today. In the mid-40s, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer, which would kill her in 1950. This coincided with the gradual collapse of her

adoption empire. For one thing, Boss Crump's influence had started to crumble in this period. Crump's political nemesis, Gordon Browning, had been elected governor in 1948. He'd gone after Georgia Tan as a way to attack his political enemies. Did you say Boss Crump crumbled? Boss Crump crumbles? Yeah. Thank you. That has to have been a newspaper headline. Yeah. Boss Crump crumbles? Yeah, 100%. 100%. I think it's crazy that she, okay, obviously crazy that she molested those kids, but that one kid said there were other people in the room molesting with her. Yeah. So like she clearly arranged these like weird sex parties where like her children could get abused like en masse. That's like. Yeah. That's fucking crazy. Yeah. And it was also one of the things

that's the the the and the baby thief makes a good point of pointing this out is that in this period of time at orphanages and stuff, an awful lot and perhaps most of the employees and like you're talking about 30s, 40s, 50s molested the kids. Like that was kind of like why you do a job that terrible. Yeah. Like that because it's like a little bonus for you. Yeah. It's your pedophile. This is 100% like like a lifetime series. Yeah. You know, like they did that. They did that one about that lady who with the Munchausen syndrome. Oh god. The um, um, yeah. I know the one you're talking about the lady. Yeah. This is very much this. Like this definitely should be a multi-part story because this is so crazy. It's one of those things it should be, but also like, I don't know

how many people are going to be able to listen to all of this episode. Yeah. I don't like, it's just so dark. Yeah. Like. Yeah. Yeah. You would only want to watch that movie if there's like serious comeuppance. Yeah. Yeah. And you're in cancer is like kind of a weird ironic cancer to have. It is ironic. Yeah. In a situation, but I say that as a breast cancer's a rival. Yeah. My, my cancer was not ironic. It was just straight up, but hers, that's super ironic. Every now and then, cancer gets it right. For real. For real. Now, uh, as Georgia was in the later stages of her cancer, Governor Browning appointed a special investigator to look into her child abduction work. The case was announced in September of 1950, less than a month before her death. It was the sort of

justice you can expect from politicians late enough to avoid any real conflict or controversy. Most of the allegations against Georgia had to do with her improper allocation of the funds she had made through adopting out children. They only care about the money. They only cared about the money, not her mass kidnapping rape or all the dead babies. Yeah. After tans death. Sounds like America. Sounds like America. Right. After tans death, Justice Kelly retired from her, the judgeship she was protected from prosecution until her death in 1955. Georgia's life has had a number of longstanding impacts. For one thing, the concept of adoption was normalized on a national level. The shame around it was gone, which was an objectively good thing. However, another holdover

from Georgia tans, uh, career is the fact that adoption records were sealed and adopted children were held back from knowing the identities of their birth parents. In many parts of the United States, the law still works this way. A holdover from the era of Georgia tan because it made it easier for her to sell in a duct in the most babies. Has any work been done in trying to locate all the kids? Yeah. A lot of that work has been done. Somebody like the kids themselves, there's a lot of people who have tracked down their own history. Uh, Barbara Raymond, the author of The Baby Thief did a lot of that work and like has done very good journalism to try and put it together. It's one of those things it will never have a comprehensive list because there was no,

of course. This was a criminal enterprise. Yeah. She specifically hid a lot of the things. Yeah. So you wouldn't be able to figure out, but I just feel like what, what a crazy thing to grow up and then find out that you were one of the babies that was abducted. Whether you had a nice life with your parents or not, it would still flip you out to find something like that out. Yeah. And I, I didn't include a lot of the stories that she does in The Baby Thieves about what these people, like these stolen babies, like, like the trauma they dealt with as adults, but like a lot of them, their lives were just fucked because they, they, they were old enough that they remembered being ripped from their mom's arms. They were five or six when it happened and they spent the whole,

their whole lives trying to like find their parents again and like they would turn out their mom, a diet or whatever. It's just, it's just, it's just terrible. It's just the worst. Like I said, this might be the most depressing episode of the show we ever do. I have trouble imagining like obviously- Someone recovering from this? Or yeah, I have trouble imagining like a worse tale than this tale of Georgia Tan and what she did. Yeah. Like there's even like, obviously like on an objective like level of scale, stuff like a concentration camp is worse and bigger and involved a lot more people, but on like a level of human evil, there's something about Georgia Tan specifically that's so wretched. It's, it's really hard to talk about. Well, I think like murder obviously is

terrible, but when you think about like children, like babies being murdered, who, you know, are the most innocent of what we have, then it is like a different level. Yeah. And then yeah, when you add the slavery and the molestation into it and you think about how many people, it, because it broke up families. It didn't just break- Thousands of them. Yeah. Break the children that broke, the moms, the dads. Yeah. You're talking in their, in their siblings? Like you're talking- Yeah. Talking mass, mass generational trauma that you're like, that's your legacy, essentially. Tens of thousands of victims. You know, if you're talking about 5,000 babies stolen, tens of thousands of victims. It's- Yeah. And I mean, probably those numbers are low too.

Probably those numbers are very low. Yeah. That's nuts. These are just best estimates. Yep. And I mean, I feel like there's kind of a weird, interesting level of maybe sexism that plays into it where it's like women maybe are given more leeway and things like this, because they're like, well, women are natural caretakers, caregivers. Women are naturally maternal. Women naturally are drawn to children. So I feel like then when you have like a woman who's like heading and spearheading a campaign and is like, I'm doing this and I'm helping babies, I think people are more likely to believe her or something because of that level of like women are natural. Yeah. You're getting two sides of sexism there because she's able to get away with it

because of this idea that like, you know, she's a woman doing this is what they should be doing. She knows what's best for these kids. But also they're getting taken from single mothers because single mothers are seen as incapable of raising like it's, it's this like double-edged sword of sexism. Yeah. I mean, it hurts everybody. And also when you think about the fact that like, who knows what would have happened if she had been allowed to be a lawyer, right? That's also another level of sexism. Jesus Christ, she could just been like a fucking prosecutor. Maybe she just would have been terrible on a smaller scale without baby murder. But also like you just, you don't know when the fact that like she has that abuse thing and whatever. It's like who knows

what the fuck her dad did to her. You know, it's like, yeah, he was, he was domineering. But who knows, there might have been like a level of like he molested her and that fucked her up for the rest of her life. And I feel like, uh, yeah, just like the amount of sexism and not trusting women also and letting people, the signing away of parental rights and then having women have no power to get them back. Like, yeah, it's all a weird sexism goes both ways in a really weird way in the story. It's pretty bad. Well, Sophia, also sorry, but I think it's crazy that no one talks about this. I know, right? How is this the first time I, and this is actually, I should give some credit to a couple of different fans have independently suggested that I look into Georgia

Tan for some time. Yeah, that's an, that's incredible story. I can't believe we didn't, I didn't know that. I never heard of this lady before, right? And it's fucking nuts. And she's like a big building block in our society. That's so nuts. Built the modern system of adoption by stealing babies. Yeah. Which like adoption, I think is objectively one of the best things you can do, you know, giving a kid a family, but not this way. Not like SDU style. Yeah, not like ordering them out of a catalog, being like, I'd like a blonde. Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah. That's rough. Sorry, Rick Flair. Oh my God. Also, has Rick Flair ever talked about this? I don't know. Because, oh my God, can we please reach out to him and be like, this is crazy,

Rick Flair. What do you think? I mean, part of me is like, if he, if he's lucky enough to not remember it, I probably wouldn't want to like push on somebody to like look into that part of their past. Like, and it wasn't bad. Like, you're afraid of upsetting Rick Flair. I mean, that's a tough thing to have in your background. Rick Flair's a wrestler, but he's still a person. I'm not saying he's not a person, but I'm saying like, maybe he would also bring him peace to talk about it. Yeah. If Rick Flair wants to come on the show and talk about, because this is so crazy, being abducted as a baby, like, yeah, we're love to talk to you. Yeah. And also, I know any listeners that have listened to this, they're like, this was part of my family or something. They should reach out.

Because what an insane thing. Suspect at least one person is going to be like, oh, shit, my grandma or my mom or whatever. And I'm sure like at a certain point, when you find that out, you want to find all the people that this has happened to because it's such a particular awful thing that you kind of want to have a sense of belonging to somewhere to talk to somebody about it that knows what it's like. And one of the things that occurs to me now is that, you know, Georgia Tan, we're looking at her victim count is around 5,000 or so. But like, like, she is the reason why for decades, it was the norm to just take babies from single women when they give birth. So really, that's maybe even a couple of million victims. Yeah,

that's a horrible legacy. I don't know how many women that happened to, but that's insane. Like, I didn't know that was just the norm for until pretty recently. Like, not when I was like, but when my parents were young adults, like, they might have given birth to me, you know, you know, like the doctor who delivered me might have delivered babies a few years earlier and handed them straight to an adoption agency, basically. Like, that's fucking wild. Yeah, that's crazy. Cool. Have fun, everyone. Have a great day. All of this information. Now you're ready to take on the rest of your day. Feeling positive. Yeah, I know a lot of people listen to the show driving to work and you're gonna have a lot of dead eyed people in work today thinking

about all the babies George has stolen. We're all sorry about that. Sorry. You know what podcast is I warned people up front. You did. I did. You gave a trigger warning. I did. This is the only time I've done that. I mean, I feel like I'm triggered. Yeah, a little bit feeling a little sad. Feel like you should be after this. Yeah. Do some aftercare. Listen to, I still don't know what the show is, but the name come town makes me laugh and the come boys. I'm just gonna make myself come after this. That's the only way to recover. That is the better. I want the glow, that post masturbatory glow to envelop me and to obscure any negativity from this. Wipe out the horror of Georgia Tann's existence. Yeah. I know I've said that like I'm for sure gonna remember

her name. Yeah. Yeah, it'll be stuck in everybody's head. Just like. No, but we gotta think about Rufus Raspberry. Rufus Raspberry. That's that's the. Walk away with that. Rufus Raspberry, Boss Crumb. Yeah. We got some good ass names. Boss Crumb, Rufus Raspberry. Yeah, think about that. Yeah. God, it does sound like an old TV show. Yeah. All right. Sophia, you want to plug them plug a boo? Sure. Find me on Twitter and Instagram at the Sophia T H E SO F I Y A and I co host a podcast called private parts unknown where we talk about love and sexuality around the world. So come listen to that. C U M C U M. I'm Robert Evans, probably, and I have a website behind the bastards.com. You can find us on the twins to Graham at bastards.plot. I'm doing that from now

on. So if you call it on the twins to Graham, it's the way it's going to work. We sell shirts to public.com for behind the bastards by a shirt by stickers, cups, hand grenades, you buying it could happen here shirt. If you want people to know that it could happen here, that's a good thing to do. We'll probably have other shirts soon. Tweeted us with ideas, podcasts, good times. I love, let's say 90% of you. I feel like I feel like we need to up that in light of how depressing this all is. Bye. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood

between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. I'm Alex French, and I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sorted tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.